Cover image

The artwork presents a single-cell perspective through a cyberpunk aesthetic lens and symbolizes the resolution of complex biological questions through artificial intelligence and advanced computing. Intentional visual distortions and glitches echo the inherent noise in sequencing data. Circular forms represent individual cells, while robotic arms direct light beams toward symbols of RNA sequence and DNA methylation. Data streams weave through both measured and computationally predicted modalities, converging upon the central processing chip, which interfaces with a holographic screen projecting mathematical formulas. In this issue, the computational framework scBOND is introduced, which enables bidirectional cross-modal translation between single-cell RNA sequencing and single-cell DNA methylation data and the capture of biologically meaningful transcriptional and epigenetic signals. (Cover art hand-drawn using Procreate on iPad by Xinran Meng, xrmeng_0131@163.com. [For details, see Lang et al., pp. 769–784.])